


Sitting on a Dance Floor

by rhodrymavelyne



Series: More Than a Jinrou [17]
Category: Shiki (Anime & Manga)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:28:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29807049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhodrymavelyne/pseuds/rhodrymavelyne
Summary: No one has the strength or the will to get up off the dance floor, even though Yuuki Natsuno, Ozaki Toshio, and Tanaka Akira are still sitting in the middle of it, remembering things they'd rather not remember, coping with trauma which they're still processing...until someone interrupts them.
Relationships: Ozaki Toshio/Yuuki Natsuno, Shimizu Megumi/Tanaka Kaori, Shimizu Megumi/Yuuki Natsuno, Tanaka Akira/Yuuki Natsuno, Tatsumi/Yuuki Natsuno, Yana Kanami/Tanaka Kaori
Series: More Than a Jinrou [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/473263
Kudos: 4





	Sitting on a Dance Floor

**Author's Note:**

> This is the 17th part of my ongoing story More Than a Jinrou which takes place after my story After the Explosion, continuing the premise that Natsuno and Tatsumi are still alive. I don’t own Shiki, but its characters, world, and scars continue to haunt me…

Akira was the first one to pull out of the group hug. He leaned back, drew a shuddering breath and socked Natsuno in the arm. Hard.

Ozaki Toshio was wise enough to let go his vampire before the blow from yet another angry mortal hit him. This was a lot less violent than the usual violence inflicted upon shiki in the past, pleasantly less violent. Of course this was Natsuno. Behavior didn’t always follow predictable patterns around him. 

He lifted his head to glance around to see if Tatsumi or that odious man were still watching. There was no sign of either of them. Just wide-eyed dancers and club-goers whom were slowly drifting away. Guess when you’ve seen one grown man cuddling a couple of boys on the floor, you’ve seen them all. 

Toshio fought the urge to laugh. Welcome to the city, Ozaki-sensei. If they’d been in Sotoba, people would have continued to stare at them, whispering to each other. His actions were gossip material for weeks, to study, chatter about, and speculate. Oh, so this is the real reason Kyoko-san left him. No one would look at him quite the same. Kids in the city had better things to talk about than an old man getting touchy feely with a couple of kids. Tatsumi might have grabbed the fine, upstanding pervert of a teacher in the middle of crowd and fed off him without anyone noticing. Toshio was half-hoping he had. 

Once again, laughter threatened to burst out from between his lips. It didn’t help that Akira’s diatribe was utterly adorable. He’d been afraid the fiesty village boy with the hair of a starfish would want to stake his little jinrou. This appeared to be the furthest thing from Tanaka Akira-kun’s mind. 

“What happened to you? Where have you been? Your father thought you were dead. Kaori thought you were dead.” Akira shook Natsuno, whom looked a bit dazed at the younger boy’s outburst, although they now appeared the same age. “Kaori was sure you died in the fire, going after the young, blue-haired vampire. I almost gave up hope!”  


“How is Kaori-chan?” Toshio asked, trying to distract Akira from his fury. He knew from past visits to the Tanaka household that the boy could be distracted by a swift topic change. 

“How do you think she is?” Akira turned his furious gaze upon Ozaki-sensei. “Shimizu Megumi took everything from us; our parents, our life. It was just as well the village burned down, for we had nothing there.”

“Akira,” Natsuno murmured, giving him a pointed look, nodding in Ozaki Toshio’s direction. Akira dropped his hand and his head, instantly abashed. 

“I’m sorry, sensei,” he mumbled, studying his leather-wrapped studded hands as if they were the most fascinating thing in the club. “You lost even more.” 

“It was a losing battle,” Toshio admitted with a sigh. For a moment he craved a cigarette. 

Natsuno pressed his fingers against his, fixing his luminous violet-blue upon him. The craving waned when he pressed the young vampire’s hand in turn. 

“Nii-chan.” Akira gazed at their hands for a moment. “You took us to a hospital. You said we’d be safe. Only I asked about you. Do you remember?”

Natsuno closed his eyes. It was Toshio’s turn to squeeze his little vampire’s hand, to offer what strength and warmth he could. 

To his surprise, Akira took Natsuno’s other hand, squeezing it just as boldly. 

Natsuno glanced at both of them, offering a smile of weary sweetness, but his eyes were cloudy with troubled memories. Toshio could almost see them reflected back. 

***

The Hospital in Mizobe

“You’ll be safe here.” As safe as you’ll be anywhere. Natsuno didn’t say this part out loud. He turned to go.

“What about you, nii-chan?” Akira looked up from where he rested his head upon his sister’s hospital bed. 

Natsuno tried to smile, but couldn’t. There was a limit to how much he could lie to these two, after all they’d been through. “I’ll never be safe again.”

It was as close as he could come to admitting what he was. Natsuno wasn’t going to say it out loud. There was no need. He didn’t plan to live long enough to trouble either Tanaka Akira or Tanaka Kaori with the knowledge of his existence. 

“There are things you have to do, aren’t there, Yuuki-kun?” Kaori had been silent, staring into a nightmare landscape only she could see. Now she fixed her large brown eyes upon Natsuno. “You have to do them before you can rest.”

Natsuno met her gaze straight on. Never had she seemed so fearless, so calm. “Yes.”

***

“Did you accomplish those things, nii-chan?” Akira gave him the same fearless gaze his sister once had. 

“No.” Natsuno shuddered for a moment, thinking of the chasm, the blast, only to wake up tied to a chair in Tatsumi’s chair. The night everything changed. 

“What he wanted to do was to kill every shiki, including himself.” Toshio spoke with a dry sarcasm which seemed to mock their former plans. “I stopped him, but I might not have, if Tatsumi hadn’t gotten to him first.”

“Tatsumi?!” Akira recoiled at his name. “That blue-haired vampire who grabbed me and left me as a snack for that old geezer? The one you kept warning Kaori and myself about?”

“The same. And yes, you’ve got every reason to be scared of him.” Natsuno sighed, wondered what to say. “I was. I hated him for what he did to Tohru-chan. I had every intention of killing him when I returned to Sotoba, even if it meant killing myself.”

Akira scowled, only something in Natsuno’s face softened the boy’s expression to a frown. “What changed?”

His blood, Natsuno thought. Even the memory of it burned upon his tongue, soothing his anger, his rage, along with Tatsumi’s feelings, the images from his memories. 

“I found out why.” Natsuno closed his eyes. “Tatsumi wanted to protect someone he loved. In that single-minded desire, he became as brutal and ruthless as anyone else who survived.”

He opened his eyes only to see Akira closing them. He knew what the boy must be remembering. Kaori beating her father with the baseball bat, again and again. The bloody shape which kept trying to crawl to her, no matter how much she hit him. 

“She’s trying to forget,” Akira murmured. “She’s living with Yana Kanami-san now.”

This time it was Toshio’s turn to close his eyes.

***

Ah, Sotoba. All Ozaki Toshio had to do was hear a name and he’d be haunted by a memory. Such as Yana Tae lying pale, unable to breathe or move, sporting the same marks on her neck he’d seen too often. The marks of a shiki. Listening to her daughter, Kanami begging him to tell her what was wrong, only he couldn’t tell her. Not yet. 

Later on he’d told an entire group of people, including Shimizu Hiroko and Takeo. They’d been only too eager to join the hunting party once they had someone to blame for their daughter, Megumi’s death. 

Shimizu Takeo never lost his zeal. Shimizu Hiroko quenched her own in blood. Ozaki Toshio would never forget how she described the results of her last hunt. It ended in the staking of Yana Tae.

“We had to hold Kanami down.” Shimizu-san’s lips trembled. “She screamed and fought us. She begged us not to. She said her mother hadn’t hurt anyone. It was her mother.” She clapsed her hands together. Each finger, her palm, her entire lower arm was bloody. “It took more of us to restrain Kanami than it did to stake…the shiki. Tae was so…small.”

Tears began to spill down her face. “When it was over, we let Kanami go. She crawled over to her mother, stretched out beside her, holding her hand up to Tae. She must have been feeding her blood. Her own daughter. She kept crying. Mama. Mama.”

Shimizu-san’s voice broke. She raised her bloody hands to cover her face. “Will I have to do this to my own daughter, sensei? Tell me!” 

“Your daughter is dead.” How flat, how cold his voice came out. “Tae-san is dead. What rises from the grave may speak with a voice we recognize, even love. It lies.”

Shimizu lowered her hands, gazing at him with a numb misery. It was a look he was seeing on far too many faces. “It lies.”

***

“Maybe I was the one who lied,” Ozaki Toshio murmured, returning to the present. “How did I know? How did I know what rose from the grave truly wasn’t someone we once known and loved?” He tightened his grip upon Natsuno’s hand. “You weren’t sure.”

“No, I wasn’t.” Natsuno bowed his head. “Even when he drained the last drop of my blood, I wasn’t sure.”  


“He?” Akira frowned. “I thought it was Megumi-chan who attacked you.”

“No.” Natsuno smiled, another bittersweet, weary smile. “Tohru-chan got to me first.”

“Mutou Tohru?” Akira’s eyes widened. “I never would have pictured him as a vampire.”

The young jinrou met the young human’s gaze in a battered moment of shared lost innocence. It made Toshio want to weep. “Neither did I.” 

“This is why I called it a losing battle.” Toshio swallowed, kept a tight grip on his little vampire’s hand. 

“What else could we have done?” Akira demanded. “We were being picked off one by one. Megumi was toying with us. She came to Kaori’s window and gloated about our father being dead. Only our father…” He swallowed, bit his lower lip. 

“You don’t have to say it.” Natsuno squeezed his hand. “We know.”

“Kaori-chan and Kanami-san shouldn’t forget.” Once again Ozaki Toshio’s words came out much harsher than he intended. “Not if they truly want to heal.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

Jinrou and mortals looked up at the shadow looming over them as they sat upon the floor. A shadow belonging to a male figure with a mass of curls, a billowing coat from another era in Europe, and a smile with sharp, elongated canines. 

“No one; not human, not shiki, nor those greater than either should ever forget Sotoba.” The stranger fixed his gaze upon Natsuno, eyes red with a hunger Natsuno, Toshio, and Akira all recognized. “Especially when such tragedy can be avoided.”


End file.
